Wednesday, November 28, 2007

I'm finally reading Atonement*

One of my favorite passage thus far:
It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of the finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled. You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith's forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade...
*I'm no longer reading American Psycho as the sidebar suggests.

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1 Comments:

At 11:39 PM, Blogger dqerwin said...

you know, all my research the past couple years has been focused on how, exactly, symbols get from the page to being understood, and vice-versa. Just read something in Derrida today about the printing press as a metaphor for the border between philosophy and (anything philosophy hasn't considered but will subsume once it does) - which is essentially the same concept.
Also, how'd you like that Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance? It's come up three times in the past week, outside of here.

 

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